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That sticker price isn't fictitious to me.
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<p>I hear ya. But, looking at it globally, it's not accurate to say that these schools charge $40,000. They don't, anymore than full business fare is an accurate reflection of what American Airlines charges to fly to Chicago. The average cost of the most selective colleges is in the $20,000 to $28,000 range including tuition, room, and board. Some pay more, some pay less. Some schools offer wealthy students their lowest prices. Some schools offer low income families their lowest prices. There's something for everybody out there, when it comes to pricing structures.</p>
<p>Can you use Deep Spring numbers to get an idea how much it costs academically to educate a person at an elite school?</p>
<p>I guess the other thing that bothers be about paying for frills is there isn't a return of investment in frills. Frills are a consumer good.</p>
<p>So if I am paying $45,000 a year (and getting $45,000 in value), and $12,000 is for living expenses and $13,000 is for fancy new buildings, more bureaucrats, better marketing, etc., I am only getting a return on $20,000, not $45,000. For full payers, which there are many at private schools, this isn't a plus.</p>
<p>If you are really getting a $70,000 value while paying $45,000, your return on investment might be quite good.</p>
<p>And there is always the psychic return on investment.</p>
<p>That's why larger schools can be much more efficient. The marginal cost of providing all the bells and whistles is relatively low as none of them are often used to capacity. So you can have an even more complete health center, more sophisticated placement and counseling, a large and specialized library, labs, rec centers etc at a reasonable cost and still have 20 students in your advanced language classes.</p>
<p>I really don't understand this argument. If colleges are providing frills, it must be because the consumer is demanding them and wiling to pay for them. If you don't want the frills, there must surely be some colleges out there without them.</p>
<p>Pricing is about supply and demand. Clearly, people paying for expensive colleges must believe they are getting their money's worth or they would not pay for expensive colleges.</p>
<p>I always find it interesting that every year the Ivy schools and other top privates come to schools like Wisconsin, Michigan, Cal, etc to raid top faculty with offers of more pay and fewer students. They know where the quality people are developed. A few go and are replaced by younger people who grow and become the next generation of top people to be lured away.</p>
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That's why larger schools can be much more efficient.
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<p>Yes. Of course. Mass production is always more efficient. Buying a suit of the rack is cheaper than a hand-tailored suit.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the larger schools don't seem to pass along the cost savings to the consumer. For example, the very large UPenn does not price its product lower than the boutique store with much smaller classes ten miles away. </p>
<p>My assumption is that the larger school is using the savings from mass production to subsidize the high-cost, low-revenue teaching of grad students.</p>
<p>BTW, is 20 students in an advanced language course supposed to be small?</p>
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Branding.........
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<p>Branding is a factor in most luxury goods purchases. My daughter visited a clothing factory in Shanghai. The factory was making shirts for an expensive designer brand and for Walmart side by side. I suspect that customers willingly pay more for the expensive designer brand shirts.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the expensive designer brand colleges so not necessarily charge more for their product. My guess is that my daughter would be paying the same price at NYU as she is at Swarthmore, give or take a buck or two.</p>
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Can you use Deep Spring numbers to get an idea how much it costs academically to educate a person at an elite school?
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<p>I think that Deep Springs is such an outlier (in every sense) that its financial model is largely irrelevant. Its model is much closer to that of a retreat than a full-service college.</p>
<p>Probably a better example would be to compare a Franklin & Marshall or a Muhlenburg to Swarthmore. Similar size schools, same region of the country. Same basic product. Nice and clean without grad schools and research divisions clouding the financial reports.</p>
<p>Average per student revenues (2004):</p>
<p>$23,288 Franklin & Marshall
$25,201 Muhlenburg
$26,585 Swarthmore</p>
<p>Average per student operating expense (2004):</p>
<p>$41,461 Franklin & Marshall
$27,355 Muhlenburg
$68,304 Swarthmore</p>
<p>For a student paying the average price, I don't think it would be a difficult choice, if acceptance letters from all three were in hand.</p>
<p>For wealthier students not qualifying for need based aid, all three schools are attracting top students with financial incentives. Swarthmore because its sticker price is $30,000 less than its per student spending. F&M because they offer "merit" discounts to wealthier students. Muhlenburg because they publish a lower sticker price (the opposite of Swarthmore's progressive pricing structure).</p>
<p>In reality, dollars are only one half of the currency required to pay for college. You "pay" the other half of the admissions fee with SAT scores and academic qualifications. It's this dynamic that sets up the othewise inexplicable situation of the most prestigious colleges offering some of the better values in purely dollars and cents terms.</p>
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20 is small enough. Is 5 really better?? Is 10 twice as good as 20? There is this thing called diminishing returns.
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<p>20 is very large for an advanced conversational language course. All things being equal, that would allow a maximum of 3 minutes of talking per student in 60 minute class. In reality, you would have a microcosm of the large university model: a few students get the educational attention (in this case, signficant talking time) while the majorty of the class gets lost in the shuffle (sitting silent).</p>
<p>"Yes. Of course. Mass production is always more efficient. Buying a suit of the rack is cheaper than a hand-tailored suit."</p>
<p>That analogy doesn't hold when comparing schools.</p>
<p>If I build the exact same building at Penn and Swarthmore, the cost per student is going to be much larger at Swat than at Penn. It's not going to be close.</p>
<p>If I pay the head person at each school $500,000, the cost per student is going to be much larger at Swat than Penn.</p>
<p>You can do this for every fixed cost. </p>
<p>I can build a much better building at Penn than Swat and still the cost per student at Penn is going to be much smaller.</p>
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I can build a much better building at Penn than Swat and still the cost per student at Penn is going to be much smaller.
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<p>Not necessarily. You have to build each building at Penn 6.5 times larger or build the same building and build 6.5 times as many of them...if you want to maintain the same ratio of facilities to undergrads.</p>
<p>There probably are some cost efficiencies when building a science center 6.5 times bigger, just as there are cost efficiencies in having grad students teach the lab sections in that building, but at some point it becomes a different product.</p>
<p>Looks like I undersold the large schools. At Wisconsin you can have 4th semester level Arabic with 14 students, Swahili with 5, Xhosa with 2, Hausa with 3, Yoruba with 4 and Korean with 8. Advanced Chinese lit courses have 10-20 students.</p>
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At Wisconsin you can have 4th semester level Arabic with 14 students, Swahili with 5, Xhosa with 2, Hausa with 3, Yoruba with 4 and Korean with 8.
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<p>You are now also illuminating the unique advantages in the marketplace of giant universities -- the ability to address every niche field. If you want to study Swahili or Xhosa, or business accounting, you certainly don't want to go to Swarthmore, regardless of the price.</p>
<p>The tradeoff is larger class sizes and less interactive education in the bread and butter departments. Check the sizes of the intro Physics or Econ lectures.</p>
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Interesteddad, how many students are there in an econ 1 class at Swarthmore and how is the class conducted?
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<p>In the semester that just ended, Swarthmore offered seven sections of Econ 001, taught by four members of the Econ faculty. The actual enrollment for the seven sections on the registrar's website ranged from 12 to 24 students. </p>
<p>The listed enrollments are frequently off by a student or two, so there may have been some balancing among the sections; for example, to reduce the size of the 24 student section. The target size is listed as 20 students per section.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, the Econ department only offers two courses with enrollment above 30 students: Intermediate Micro and Intermediate Macro. Both of these have two lectures per week plus five sections of discussion conference that each meet for 1.15 hours per week with about 10 to 20 students in each section. These discussion sections are all taught by the same professor teaching the lecture sections.</p>
<p>The only other large lecture courses that I know about are Psych 001 (gotta be the worst course in the catalog at every college on earth), a couple of intro Art History survey courses, and a couple of the intro science courses for non-majors. The intro sciences courses for majors are typically fairly small (15 to 30 students).</p>
<p>Out of 377 class sections last year at Swarthmore, only 10 had 40 or more students. 19 more sections had 30 to 39 students.</p>
<p>61 class sections had 20 to 29
154 class sections had 10 to 19
133 class sections had 2 to 9 students.</p>
<p>92 of the classes above were further divided into sub-sections (lab, discussion, etc.)</p>
<p>As far as how Econ 001 is taught, I don't know. Most intro social science course at Swat seem to be what I would describe as an "interactive lecture", but it varies from professor to professor.</p>
<p>The "WA" they are talking about refers to Writing Associates. This is program where Swarthmore students are selected to take a special advanced writing course fall semester of sophmore year. They then become writing associates who peer review drafts of papers for students in the Writing Center. The program is extensively used. 1275 papers were WA'd at the drop in center last year.</p>
<p>In addition to the writing center, many of the intro courses have specific course WAs (usually majors in that department) assigned to the class. As you can see from the syllabus, getting the paper WA'd in this course is pretty much mandatory for all but brain dead students. </p>
<p>The open-ended nature of the essay topics seems to be typical as well, based on what my daughter has shared. Her take-home final exam question in American Politics was: "What good is judicial review, really?"</p>
<p>For intro level econ the class size is not that important. You are following a national text that is used in 90% of schools from Harvard to Eastern tech. The fact is beyond that the class sizes will shrink dramatically and if you stay in econ you can take advanced econometrics from the guy who wrote the book, served at the Fed, and maybe advised a President or two.</p>